Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule

Mr Rodriguez contemplating the
implications of the Supreme Court's
1972 Flood v. Kuhn ruling which
upheld Major League Baseball's
exemption from anti-trust litigation,
despite what many observers
considered an 'overly strict'
reliance on stare decisis
...and Chien-Ming Wang's rash.

While carrying out my usual research on the broader public importance of obscure facits of baseball I happened across this unusual legal article that explains, in excessively footnoted detail, the legal and societal precidents for the adoption of the Infield Fly Rule. For those sociopathic Americans who don't tivo spring training games, or humans who are from that wild and lawless land that isn't America, the Infield Fly Rule states that when there are less than two outs and runners on first and second, the batter is automatically out if he hits a pop-fly that could be easily caught by an infielder -- whether or not the infielder actually catches it. This prevents the defense from intentionally dropping the fly ball to make a double-play. The runners in this situation have no choice but to stand near their respective bags, assuming the ball will be caught, and then in the event that it isn't, would be too far from advancing to 3rd and 2nd to avoid an easy double play. It's baseball's equivalent of the en passant.

The article, (which was published anonymously and later revealed to have been written by then law-student William S. Stevens), describes the invention and evolution of the rule in the 1890's in a scholarly/mock-scholarly tone that apes similar, less light-hearted works with overt formality. A footnote on the word "origin" reads:

6: For a discussion of origins, see generally Scopes v. State, 154 Tenn. 105, 289 S.W. 363 (1927). Genisis 1:1-2:9. But see even more generally Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968); R. ARDREY, AFRICAN GENESIS (1961); C. DARWIN, THE DECENT OF MAN (1871); C. DARWIN, THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1859).

Stevens mainly describes how the rule developed out of a widespread desire to preserve the 'gentlemanly' nature of the sport, and was later modified with the same goal in mind -- for instance by reducing the role that umpires originally had in enforcing it, whereby they would make a ruling on who was out and where they runners ought to be after the play had taken place. Since this could cause arguments (and a purpose of the rule is to let the game play out with everyone playing to their best abilities) it was changed so that the umpire calls it and gestures during the play, to put everyone on equal footing. Also interesting is his retelling of how the calls for such a rule arose out of a game in 1893 where an infielder intentionally allowed a fly to drop with a runner on first, but only in order to catch the runner because he was faster than the batter. He got only a single out, not two, merely substituting a fast runner on first for a fat, slow one, and this isn't even a situation that the rule applies to! And once this tactic had been realized, similar plays seemed to have the umpire calling out the runner regardless of the fact that there was no rule against intentional drops.


Evidently, there are a number of parallels between the standards that established the IFR and those that formed English Common Law. I'm not an expert on historical legal questions, but the comparisons he makes are fairly broad, so I doubt that they are too controversial. The idea that the academic world was begging for a comparison of these two things is a little more far-fetched, but it's still a great topic, due to the amount of analysis you can do on such an obscure rule.


Still, I can't help but wonder about one thing -- he rightly points out that the nature of baseball has its roots in 19th century English sporting culture, that it's intended goal was more about exercise and camaraderie than competition. The attitudes of this society and era, to "[keep] the rules simple and [allow] moral force to govern the game" is apparent in many aspects of modern baseball. For simplicity there are things like the fact that there are no rules about where fielders can stand (or that there are even any codified differences between them), or knocking over fielders covering a base (as long as you're not unnecessarily violent about it) what constitutes a pitch (the eephus counts), a strike, a fair ball, etc. There are even more examples of moral impulses codified in the rules*: balks, catcher's interference, crowd interference, uproar about sign-stealing, slapping at balls during a tantrum. It's not a rule, but people even get upset about running over the mound when you're not supposed to. Not to mention steroids. Hmmm...a lot of these things are A-Rod related...


Anyway, the thing that I think I disagree with him about is the notion that these attitudes are primarily English. I don't doubt that they were originally, but if that is true, why does baseball, which has been developing in the US for at least 150 years, retain a strong sense that right and wrong are important to the sport while soccer, which was also arose out of this gentlemanly English attitude of fair play (and is most popular there) is more rife with unpunished deception and fake injuries than pretty much all other sports?

"Aside, The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule," anonymous, 123 Univ. Penn. Law Review 1474 (1975).

*The primary counter-example to the moral prohibition against trickery in baseball that springs to mind is the hidden-ball trick, but it's overruled by the opposing desire for simplicity.

*Etc

The Freakonomics Blog points out some graveyard humor, describing the origin of this clever headstone juxtaposition.

They belong to chemists buried in the Yale's cemetery. The one on the left of a John Kirkwood, while the right is Lars Onsager, both of whom were brilliant statistical and fluid mechanics. At first glace this looks like the absolute apex of academic one-upsmanship, but as usual, there is a buzzkilling explanation that involves these two guys not hating each other. Kirkwood died pretty young and his widow basically decided to make his headstone a curriculum vitae for some reason. Most people who knew him thought it was a bit odd, but Onsager's wife wanted to do the same for him when he died, but her family talked her out of it. His son Erling wanted to put an asterisk on there, but she vetoed it as being mean-spirited.

But the idea of the asterisk stayed in Erling’s mind, and years later, when the children were adding their mother’s death date to the monument, they also added the asterisk and the “etc.” footnote. “When my mother died, my brothers and sister and I, we all agreed it was the right thing to do,” said Erling.

Erling wanted to set the record straight on his family’s motive for including the notation:

The idea was very tongue-in-cheek. It wasn’t done maliciously. It was triggered by the neighboring headstone, but it was not aimed at it.

And all the people involved seem to agree that both of these gentlemen would have found it hilarious. So revenge downgraded to gentle comedy. It kind of reminds me of Jefferson's headstone, that mentions only that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, and Virginia Statute of religious freedom and that he founded the University of Virginia -- without bothering to point out that he was the President. Which, if you think about it, seems to say to all the other presidents "Oh, you were the president too? That's sort of cool I guess. I didn't think it was worth making a big deal out of..."

There Are Better Sources of Riboflavin

An annoying girl in my morning math class was drinking out of a pint-sized half-and-half carton today. One of the types with the plastic screw top.

There are two possibilities here, and I don't know which is worse. Either she was drinking cream, as advertised (at least having the good sense to cut it with milk). Or she finished using the container and said to herself "Now this thing would be perfect for storing liquids in! I should wash it out, refill it with a commonly accepted beverage, and take it with me to use in public."

This is only the latest in the string of extremely weird dietary choices my friend and I have spotted among students of this class. Last week a different girl was consuming what appeared to be individually wrapped balls of dough with jelly on the inside. We spent much of class debating the meaning of this item. Before that, there was someone chowing down on gray, pencil-sized sticks of something out of a crinkly wrapper. There is only one class left, and I'm hoping to see a candy apple or a gigantic turkey drumstick.

Physics Ball

The past few times I've filled out one of those bracket thingies, I've been pretty lucky through no fault of my own. Typically, I just go by the team records and guess, without any overriding methodology or interest. The method Chad Orzel employs to create the "Worst NCAA Pool Bracket Ever" is pretty admirable though: NCAA picks by physics graduate program ranking:

Winners determined by the rankings of the physics graduate programs of the competing schools. (If only one of the schools offers a Ph.D. program in physics, that school wins; if neither school has a graduate program, the higher seed wins.)

It is hard to see in the above picture, but basically it has Cornell over Wisconsin, with UNC and UCLA rounding out the final four. The last two aren't far fetched, but Cornell is wonderfully bonkers (update: they are already out! oh well, there is always next year Ivy League.) In fact the rest of the, um, 'elite eight' are actually not so weird either: Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Pittsburgh, Duke, but I mean, come on. [Full pdf in original post.]

It is worth noticing that the schools begin seeded as they are in the actual tournament, by basketball, not Physics. If there were organized by Physics to begin with (get on this NCAA!) you wouldn't have Stanford vs. Cornell in the first round. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But then again, neither does polluting academic institutions with recruited athletes.

[Uncertain Principles]

(One of) The dark underbelly(s) of elite schools

At least in the Physics community, there seems to be a great deal of emphasis on the under-representation of women. There is also some concern about the lack of minorities. Coming in at a distant 3rd, if it is discussed at all, is the difficulty of coming from a modest background. I am probably biased, but based on my experience, I believe the latter to be at least as big a handicap as the first two. Someone out there will probably hate me for saying this, and obviously I'm not any sort of expert here, but I think the main reason for the lack of females has more to do with societal expectations or pressure before matriculating to universities, rather than marginalizing attitudes once they are there. (Some of my other thoughts on this matter are already well known.) The sort of old-fashioned sexist professors often imagined to be influencing this disparity are a dying breed, and they are being replaced by the sort of diversity-minded people who write op-eds and hold conferences about women in science in the first place. There is a lot of attention paid to that issue, as well as scholarships, preferential programs, etc. -- all things which are important -- while there is basically no attention paid to the difficulty of coming up through a system that is totally unfamiliar to anyone whose parents have never, under any circumstances, imagined that they would one day be in the position to buy a Volvo. Rather, the academic mainstays are the folks who were fortunate to be guided by parents who are intellectuals of one type or another, and who probably at least "considered" getting a PhD themselves. Growing up, I was frequently warned about the price of those "really good" colleges by my folks, and later about grad school, which they were surprised to find out was not something I would need to pay for myself. The uncertainty of never knowing whether the rug is going to be yanked out from under you definitely has a stifling effect on academic achievement.

This isn't a woe-is-me post. My upbringing was never very uncomfortable and my folks made a point of fostering intellectual development. But I was one of the people fortunate to have parents who were trying, there is no chance I would be on my way to a PhD program if they didn't undertake the tremendous effort of shuffling me around to decent schools and supporting my desire to go on to a career they knew almost nothing about. This is all a very roundabout way of getting to this excellent article from the NY Times Book Review on the way "income inequality" manifests itself at elite colleges. It is a bit more serious and scolding than the kind of stuff I usually point to...

[C]ampus liberals far prefer the soft issues of racial and gender diversity to such hard issues as the effect on American working families of cheap foreign labor or the gross inequities of a public school system funded by local property taxes, or, closer to home, the failure of their own institutions to recruit and support more talented students with no money. I have met very few faculty members who, even as they agitate for far-flung social causes, care to look closely at the admissions policies of their own institutions.

...but it considering the unfortunate rarity of such articles, it is worth pointing out.